The actors Americans say would get them into a movie theater average 57.8 years old, and Johnny Depp is 14th on that list.
Hollywood spent four years treating Depp as unreleasable. Paramount has him in a film this fall, Lionsgate has one in March, and Disney still wants him back for another Pirates of the Caribbean.
"But anyway, it's probably a sign of, like, where we are both as a culture, post-woke, one, as your pal AOC would say, and also where Hollywood is as an industry, just being ruthlessly practical about trying to get people to the multiplex."
Peter Hamby covers politics and media at Puck and hosts this show; Jon Kelly co-founded Puck, is the show's executive producer, and worked at the New York Times earlier in his career — which is the comparison he reaches for when the Wall Street Journal's AI problem comes up.
I listened to the full episode so you can skip it. 17 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
🎙️ Hosts: Peter Hamby, who covers politics and media for Puck and hosts The Powers That Be, and Jon Kelly, Puck's co-founder and the show's executive producer, who worked at the New York Times earlier in his career
📰 Published: 31 August 2026 on YouTube (Puck)
🔴 YouTube | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 17 min | ✅ Time saved: 7 min
Key Takeaways
Three studios are betting on Johnny Depp at once, and the test screening is why
The demographic most expected to reject him rated the film most favorably
The list of actors who actually sell tickets is a list of 1990s stars
Their average age is 57.8, and the pattern held with Gen Z respondents too
The reason is not nostalgia, it is that the format stopped growing
The next generation of famous people came from YouTube, and stayed there
A billionaire investor used AI to write a Wall Street Journal op-ed and the paper shrugged
Its op-ed editor said the ideas are what matter, not the assembly of the words
Hamby's position is that every journalist should use AI, and the norms will follow
Kelly's defense is that op-eds under famous bylines were already ghostwritten
1. Lane Kiffin tests the rules
The episode opened on college football's week zero, with the hosts admitting they were taping on Friday, and Kelly asking Hamby for a thirty-second verdict on Lane Kiffin.
Hamby treated it as in character rather than as news. The subject is an attempt to recruit NFL athletes into college football, which a judge has backed even as the SEC and other conferences say players cannot go to the NFL and come back
"I think Lane just exists to test every boundary there is out there."
His read on the legal position was that nobody has one. "I think it's unclear what's legal or not legal anymore in college sports. You got to keep pushing the boundaries. Good for him."
2. A 10% chance on Belichick
Kelly asked what the chances are that Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson are both at the North Carolina home opener next season.
Hamby priced it, and reached for a prediction market to check himself. "Oh man, I'd go on Kalshi and look at this if it's not already a wager contract they have. I say there's a 10% chance."
Kelly's own number was higher: "I was going to go 30." He then agreed with the lower figure
Hamby noted what the question implies — that the relationship is being handicapped against the length of Belichick's tenure at the university
3. Depp tested well with women
Hamby built the segment off Matt Belloni's What I'm Hearing column at Puck, reading its closing line: "real movie stars are such an endangered species these days that people seem willing to forgive and forget"
"The long rumored, awaited, whispered-about comeback of Johnny Depp is now upon us."
The vehicle is a Gothic Paramount take on A Christmas Carol called Ebenezer, screened in New Jersey by the studio's Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. Both the film and Depp himself scored well
The result that surprised the room was demographic. "Women over 35, who you'd think might be most put off by Johnny Depp's personal behavior, rated the movie most favorably, I'm told, with Depp's scores in that demo hitting 90%."
Kelly's explanation is that the audience separates the person from the performance. To the 35-and-up demographic Depp is still the actor from 21 Jump Street, and he described them suspending the parasocial relationship they have with his personal difficulties
4. The 90s stars are forever
The evidence underneath the bet is an earlier piece of Belloni's, built on research from the market-research firm NRG.
The question was engineered to measure ticket sales rather than affection. "Please list up to five actors or actresses that would make you most interested in seeing a new movie in a theater in the future."
"Not who do you like? Not whose movies do you want to see? Very specifically, who puts butts in seats."
The top of the list is Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Dwayne Johnson, Brad Pitt and Ryan Reynolds. Depp was 14th
"Belloni made the point that the stars of the '90s are forever. And this was true among Gen Z also, by the way."
That is why there are three projects, not one. Ebenezer from Paramount, an action thriller called Daydrinker from Lionsgate in March, and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel Disney has wanted for years
"They want to do it with Johnny Depp, because he puts butts in seats."
5. Hollywood is being practical
Kelly and Hamby split on why the 1990s cohort has not been replaced.
Kelly's version is that the culture moved and the movies did not. Since roughly the 1940s, and again after Hollywood was remade in the 1960s and 1970s, popular culture came through the big screen. That has changed
"When I think about like who my kids think are famous, it's people who've come from YouTube" — he named Mark Rober, MrBeast and Miss Rachel
His read on the studio's behavior is that risk aversion cuts both ways. The industry is a big tent trying to appeal to everyone, so the worst outcome is a film cancelled before release. If the screening had gone badly, he said, Paramount would have bagged it
The corollary is that the studio has internal information the public does not: the test results are the permission
Hamby's version is structural rather than cultural. "But I think that it's not only that they're nostalgic, but the format is now no longer innovative or growing at all. So the stars of it are frozen, and the stars of tomorrow, with the exception probably of Tom Holland and Zendaya, are stars of other mediums, right?"
The ages make the point on their own. "The average age of these stars, Jon, was 57.8." He listed Tom Cruise at 62, Depp at 61, Robert Downey Jr at 60, Tom Hanks at 68 and Kevin Hart at 45, with Zendaya, Tom Holland, Margot Robbie and Jennifer Lawrence as the minority
6. Druckenmiller used AI
Hamby turned to what he called the Wall Street Journal's journalism scandal of the previous week, and Kelly immediately queried the word.
The facts, as Hamby laid them out. Stanley Druckenmiller wrote a Journal op-ed attacking Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for meddling in the bond markets. People ran it through AI detection tools because it read as though a model had written it
Druckenmiller confirmed it when asked. "Yeah, I use AI. I like — I'm not a great writer. I wish I was a better writer."
His own analogy: "I think of it like a calculator. Like, if you're not good at math, use a calculator." Hamby allowed that this is not a bad comparison
7. The Journal did not blink
The paper's op-ed editor backed the piece. "Paul Gigot, the longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, said it didn't violate any of their policies" — on the reasoning that the ideas matter rather than the work of assembling the words
Hamby set out his own conflict rather than picking a side. "I am a proud creative guy. I care about writing. I worry about AI and its effect on developing certain skill sets among young people."
"I want young people to learn how to write and read without these sort of cheat codes."
"I personally found it hard to get mad about this, and I don't know, maybe I should."
His comparison is institutional. "If this happened at the New York Times, where you worked at one point, there would have been — I mean, the Slack would have been alight." The Journal, he said, is more generous toward Wall Street figures, and an op-ed is an op-ed
Kelly agreed on the newsroom politics. "Well, the right is always better at withstanding scandals than the left, which usually just starts, you know, eating each other alive, starting with their toenails"
Both drew the same line, at reporting. Kelly noted the piece was an idea piece carrying Druckenmiller's own ideas, that human editors worked on it, and that "I think that it probably would have been a little bit different if this was a piece of reportage."
8. Op-eds are already ghosted
Hamby's position is that the argument is already over. "Get ready, everyone, because every journalist should use AI, because every person on Earth is going to be using AI, and the rules are going to be shifting"
He expects a gut-level norm to settle in, of the kind that already governs crediting someone else's research and ideas rather than taking them outright
"But like we're in this really annoying phase right now where it's very binary, and you have the anti-AI people, and actually you feel a lot of that in the creative community in Hollywood."
He credited the framing to Nvidia's chief executive. He said it is the Jensen Huang line — "the future belongs not to AI but to the people who know how to harness it, and I think that's just as true in journalism and in media as it is anywhere else" — and that its persuasiveness is what has put Nvidia at the center of about 800 billion dollars of AI financing deals
Kelly's defense of the Journal is that nothing changed. "So, I kind of had a very positive response to Gigot's stance. I'm glad he didn't buckle."
His argument is that op-eds placed by governors, senators and executives are effectively press releases, drafted and cut by teams, ghost writers and communications advisers before they run
He pointed at the plagiarism episodes that follow from the same practice, naming Fareed Zakaria's, and said the cause is busy people publishing concepts under their byline that somebody else wrote
Bonus Insights
The hosts admitted on air that Media Monday is taped on Friday, ahead of the college football opener between Bill Belichick's North Carolina and TCU in Dublin
The closing exchange took the ghostwriting argument to its most famous recent case. Kelly: "Peter, do you think that your buddy Prince Harry wrote every single word of Spare?" Hamby: "I have a feeling — I know he's a natural, has a poet's mind, but I think that J.R. Moehringer helped."
A digression on why the 1990s cohort still looks the same. Hamby said the generation is uniformly altered — "Everyone's on a GLP-1, and everyone's had their teeth redone." — and named Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Kidman as the same case
Kelly's example was rewatching The Devil Wears Prada before its sequel and finding Anne Hathaway, who Hamby put at 43, looking younger now than she did then
Hamby's bottom line across both stories is the same one: an industry that has stopped growing gets ruthless about what still works, whether that is a 61-year-old actor the culture had written off, or an op-ed page deciding that whose ideas they are matters more than who typed them.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Paramount, Lionsgate and Disney (The three studios with Depp projects: Ebenezer this fall, Daydrinker in March, and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel Disney still wants)
NRG (The market-research firm behind the survey of which actors would get someone into a theater — the list Depp sits 14th on)
The Wall Street Journal (Whose op-ed page ran Druckenmiller's AI-assisted piece and declined to treat it as a violation)
Kalshi (Where Hamby said he would look for a contract on whether Belichick and Jordan Hudson are still together next season)
Nvidia (Cited for Jensen Huang's line about harnessing AI, which Hamby says has put the company at the center of the AI financing cycle)
The New York Times (Hamby's counterfactual newsroom, where he says the same op-ed would have become a full controversy)
YouTube (Where Kelly says his children's famous people come from, rather than from film)
Books & Resources Mentioned
What I'm Hearing – Matt Belloni (Puck's Hollywood newsletter; both the Depp screening piece and the earlier NRG survey write-up that the segment is built on)
Spare – Prince Harry (Raised by Kelly as the test case for ghostwriting; Hamby said he assumes J.R. Moehringer helped)
If this was worth your time, send it to someone closer to the industry than you are.
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